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Searching for life on a near Earth asteroid.
OSIRIS-Rex is a cool mission
because for the first time we are going
to a primitive asteroid.
The RQ36 and its family most likely contain water
and volatile organic material and that's one
of the reasons we want to go there.
That's ahead.
First, here's what's happening at NASA Now.
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After traveling four years and 2.7 billion kilometers,
NASA's Dawn spacecraft successfully entered into orbit
around the asteroid Vesta on July 15, 2011.
NASA engineers have been subtly shaping Dawn's trajectory
for years to match Vesta's orbit around the sun.
Using the gravity from the massive asteroid,
Dawn was pulled into orbit around Vesta.
After spending a year in orbit around Vesta, Dawn departs
for its second destination, Ceres, July 2012.
And check out these great shots of the final launch
of the space shuttle Atlantis taken from a variety
of different viewpoints.
The STS-135 mission was the final mission
of the space shuttle program bringing
to an end the extraordinary NASA program
that operated for 30 years.
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Now let's take a look at the past.
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February 12, 2001, the NEAR Shoemaker made history
by being the first spacecraft ever to land on an asteroid.
Using a controlled descent, the ship ended its five-year,
two-billion-mile journey when it landed on the asteroid 433 Eros.
Although not equipped with landing gear,
the repurposed spacecraft NEAR Shoemaker landed softly
and sent back signals
for 16 days before communication was lost.
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No, OSIRIS-Rex is not a dinosaur
that roamed the Earth millions of years ago.
It's an exciting new mission
that will help scientists understand the possible origins
of life on Earth.
Here with more info on this amazing project is NASA's senior
scientist for primitive bodies, Dr. Joseph Nuth.
So what is OSIRIS-REx?
OSIRIS-REx is a cool mission
because for the first time we're going to go
to a primitive asteroid.
What I mean by a primitive asteroid is one
that is small enough that the radioactivity contained
within the solids when this thing formed was not sufficient
enough to heat this body to the point where it melted.
What is OSIRIS-REx going to be doing on its mission?
We're going to be in orbit around RQ36 for close
to a year, 400 something days.
The first thing we're going to do
when we get to RQ36 is map it.
We're going to come up nice and slowly.
We're going to look at it very carefully as it rotates.
We're going to find out whether or not it's nice
and uniform and heterogeneous.
Alright, mapping it for navigation is first.
What's the next step?
We'll probably sit down with the PI and science teams
in a closed room and fight for a couple of days
about which spot is going to give us the best sample.
A sample? How is it going to get a sample?
What happens is OSIRIS-REx has a sampling device that sits
on the end of a three-meter boom.
And so that boom will come down touch the surface.
It's only there for five seconds, picks up a sample
and goes back out again.
So the entire mission is going to come down to
which spot we put that sample on, for five seconds,
to pick up the regolith and then move away,
make sure we've got sample and then bring back to Earth.
Wow. How is it going to do that?
The way it works is that, if you think about an upside
down trash can and at the edge of the trash can, the open lip
that touches the surface, we inject a high pressure of gas.
What that does on the asteroid is it makes the surface a fluid.
Now, at the closed end
of the trash can we've got the equivalent of an air filter.
So what happens?
You have a vacuum in space.
You've got high-pressure gas that's been injected
into the surface and its confined
in that trashcan for a few seconds.
The fluidized bed comes up and tries to get out.
And as it goes out the air filter, well, the gas goes out
but the regolith material sort of falls
into an annular groove around the inside.
And so, that's how we collect the sample.
That sounds like a lot of work.
Why is this asteroid getting all this special attention?
The RQ36 and its family most likely contain water
and volatile organic materials - and that's one
of the reasons we want to go there.
It's got the highest chance of any of the asteroids
that we can get to fairly easily of having
that type of composition.
This has effectively the materials that were gathered
up from the solar nebula, 4.5 billion years ago.
What it has in it potentially is the chemistry
that represents the material that fell down onto the Earth
that could have seeded life on the Earth.
And we want to know what the original stuff was,
and we want to know it without a doubt.
That way we can tell the star systems
that we see forming now, could they make life?
Nothing to do with intelligent life,
we're talking pond scum level here.
But, you know, it's the original stuff, the stuff that, you know,
single cell organisms maybe.
Even the - even more primitive than that.
Why not just grab a sample that has already fallen to Earth?
Alright, the sample that we get
from meteorites could potentially be contaminated.
They lay on the ground for sometimes hundreds of years.
In Antarctica, they lay there for thousands of years
and you can't tell what happened to those from the time they
where actually in the asteroid 'til the time
that we picked them up and brought them back in our museum.
If you find interesting biochemistry,
things like amino acids or sugars or other things
that we run into the building blocks of life on the Earth,
effectively you cannot tell whether or not
that was contamination
or whether it was the original material.
So this is a pristine sample and that's how it will be analyzed.
I was wondering, what kid of advice would you give to someone
who wants to do what you do?
What I recommend for any student is to do what you love.
Part of the reason that I can spend way more
than eight hours a day on it is because it's the kind
of thing that I like doing.
And if you love doing something, it's not work.
Exploring and getting to ask questions and getting to find
out the results of experiments that are dreamed up,
so to speak, based on what you don't know - that's great.
It's fantastic.
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Ever wonder about the origins of the universe?
Well, here's a great activity for you and your students
to try in your classroom.
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Just like scientists are interested in the composition
of material on the surface of RQ36,
you and your students can begin to unravel the mysteries
of the universe with Graph Analysis:
Genesis - Exploring Data.
This is a lesson found
on the NASA Explorer Schools' Virtual Campus.
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Well that's it for NASA Now, be sure to tune in next week
when we take aim in NASA's Ballistics Lab.
3, 2, 1, 0
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We'll see you then on NASA Now.
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NASA Now comes to you from the Virtual Campus
at NASA Explorer Schools.